How do you cut off text after a certain amount of characters in PHP?

Question

I have two string that i want to limit to lets say the first 25 characters for example. Is there a way to cut off text after the 25th character and add a ... to the end of the s

Answer 1

To avoid cutting right in the middle of a word, you might want to try the wordwrap function ; something like this, I suppose, could do :

$str = "this is a long string that should be cut in the middle of the first 'that'";
$wrapped = wordwrap($str, 25);
var_dump($wrapped);

$lines = explode("\n", $wrapped);
var_dump($lines);

$new_str = $lines[0] . '...';
var_dump($new_str);

$wrapped will contain :

string 'this is a long string
that should be cut in the
middle of the first
'that'' (length=74)

The $lines array will be like :

array
  0 => string 'this is a long string' (length=21)
  1 => string 'that should be cut in the' (length=25)
  2 => string 'middle of the first' (length=19)
  3 => string ''that'' (length=6)

And, finally, your $new_string :

string 'this is a long string' (length=21)

With a substr, like this :

var_dump(substr($str, 0, 25) . '...');

You'd have gotten :

string 'this is a long string tha...' (length=28)

Which doesn't look that nice :-(

Still, have fun !